Richard Burton once told an interviewer that “there was a second or two, perhaps about a year ago, when I didn’t fancy much staying alive.” When the interviewer followed up by asking if he had contemplated suicide, the actor shrugged it off, insisting that he would have never killed himself “in the ordinary sense of the word.” He merely, as Burton put it, couldn’t bear the richness of the world, and thought it best to leave. Less than a decade later, he died at age 58, his health winnowed away by alcohol abuse.
Though they tend not to be as reflective as that Shakespearean actor, the characters in Darren Aronofsky movies share his unconscious death urge, and indulge it in oblique ways—like ballet and professional wrestling. In The Whale, which Samuel D. Hunter adapted from his 2012 play, Charlie’s slow poison is food. He is, literally and figuratively, morbidly obese.
I once saw a superb production of the show on stage. The blackouts were punctuated by the sound of waves and Charlie’s rundown Idaho apartment unit, where the action takes place, was ringed with oceanic detritus. It was hard to miss the big picture: even when it does not harm us directly, junk food chokes our environment. This seems less an indictment of individual motives than an acknowledgement of how readily available Charlie’s drug of choice is. To say he bulked up on his feelings of self-loathing is not quite the same as saying that obese people are loathsome. Charlie—who is gay—internalized the homophobia of his religious rural community. Repression shattered his family and self-hatred ruined the life of his partner. This led to his mental health spiraling out: he tacked on weight in the tailspin. And yet Charlie’s protestations that he is not grotesque cannot help but ring hollow when his size has been made a symbol of his dysfunction.
Little Women does not, for the most part, feel like a current film. Obviously, the Louisa May Alcott book, published 150 years ago, is a classic—and Greta Gerwig has adapted it in full period splendor. It stumbles early on, insecure about how to juggle the host of characters and hops in the timeline, which forces the wandering eye to scramble as it takes in all the Victorian fabrics and wallpapers. Gerwig’s recreation of a Bowery street scene is so thorough that one wishes Jo wasn’t in such a rush, even if slowing down would defy her constitution. But the movie increases in sureness as it goes along.
Though the book is autobiographical, and widely considered to be timeless, it is set in a unique moment of 19th-century American history, when most of the men were off fighting the Civil War, leaving the women to their own devices. And there is another level of specificity, too, that the movie elides: Alcott grew up in Concord, Mass., to parents who hobnobbed with the likes of Emerson and Thoreau. There was perhaps no other place in the country at that time that was as receptive to women with artistic ambitions.
The March sisters, archetypically, each have their own: Jo (Saoirse Ronan) wants to be a writer; Meg (Emma Watson) an actress; Amy (Florence Pugh) a painter; and Beth (Eliza Scanlen) a musician. Their mother (Laura Dern) has a bleeding heart, and donates Christmas breakfast to an impoverished family (the Marches are poor, too, but float on their social clout); and their aunt (Meryl Streep), a realist, milks money and clout for all it’s worth.
When people talk about “the way things happen in the movies,” the kind of movie they are talking about is Bohemian Rhapsody. In this big-time biopic of Freddie Mercury, the front man of Queen, and one of the first celebrities to die of AIDS, in 1991, conflicts set up in one scene get knocked down in the next—typically with a line or two of self-affirmation wisdom. Even though expecting poetry to issue from the mouth that sang “We Will Rock You” and “Fat Bottom Girls” sounds like an unreasonable ask, the film implores us to see this showman as a visionary when he describes “Bohemian Rhapsody” to a record producer (Mike Myers!) who doesn’t seem to have lived through the 1960s, despite working with Pink Floyd. Scaramouche indeed.
Bohemian Rhapsody has the relentless falseness of a movie made to make money. It takes a work of unalloyed philistinism to assume that audiences will be brought to orgasm by the viewership figures for Live Aid, and it lets Freddie get away with telling his father that reviving his flagging career on an unprecedentedly large platform is an act of selflessness. I think the film wants us to believe, like the football-coach conductor in Whiplash, that the apogee of acting is impersonation, and that the producers would have built a robot to replicate Freddie’s moves, step by step, if Rami Malek (doing the best he can with sloppy material) wasn’t a more cost-effective solution.
To this mindset, performance has little to do with any personal vision; it’s about giving the audience exactly what it paid for. I think the packagers of this movie may truly believe that Queen, arena rockers with roots in glam, was for “outsiders.” Like white people who feel persecuted in America.
Green Book—whether it intends to or not—makes a virtue of simplicity. I think reasonable people could disagree about the merits of that virtue, or their political value in this kind of movie, especially in this day and age. If, however, you find yourself outraged by Green Book, on the grounds that it is a toxic work that polite society is obliged to cancel, I suggest you log off of Twitter and take a deep breath. It is understandable that people of color would feel patronized by Hollywood, but Hollywood can be a useful ally. For better or worse, it has a knack for meeting people where they are.
Granted, Nick Vallelonga, whose screenplay was “inspired” by his father’s experiences, has the shrewd competence of a Hollywood hack. It’s as if the occupants of the car in Driving Miss Daisy pulled a Chinese fire drill—now it’s an uncouth white driver (“Tony Lip,” played by Viggo Mortensen) pitted against a super-couth black passenger (Don Shirley, played by Mahershala Ali). Not only do they learn about themselves, and each other, but they go on a road trip (through the Deep South, in the innocently early ’60s)!
I think it is wise to set aside the problems inherent in crafting a true story around subjects who are dead—not because it is unimportant, but because it is far from unique to Green Book. Granted, a nightclub bouncer with mob connections, like Tony, seems like a man given to tall tales; his son clearly loved him; and Don, a classically trained pianist, was—if the movie can be trusted at all—a private individual, not given to revealing much of himself. Nobody “owns” history, but it does seem tilted in favor of chatterboxes.
Manchester by the Sea and Moonlight, the best two of the paltry five Best Picture nominees I’ve seen, are twin lamentations: the first, bleakly cold, white, and northern; the second, sensuously warm, black, and southern. Both deal with coastal inhabitants that hardly qualify as “élite.” Despite the setting—a haven for old money on the North Shore of Massachusetts—the Chandler family in Manchester by the Sea has the sweat stains of the white working class we’re hearing so much about these days; they’re as straight and white as Chiron, from South Florida, is gay and black. And though the Atlantic has thematic significance to both, one imagines that these sets of characters would be two ships in the night, never passing nor considering one another, save for at Oscar time. That is to say, these Americans would have no rapport with one another except with a screen as mediator, and that says as much about the simultaneous importance and irrelevance of the Academy Awards in these parlous times as anything else does.
I’m even less qualified than usual to make sweeping judgments this cycle. Given the load of symbolic bricks weighted to the decision, I’m as curious as anyone to see what title is pulled from the envelope. Picking La La Land would, in any other year, be the neutral, inoffensive choice—it’s a shiny lollipop of a movie that will get just as many musicals green-lighted as The Artist churned out silent pictures. And yet, in Trumpistan, honoring such a white-telephone movie would seem very Vichy indeed. Manchester might be dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of Casey Affleck, but if voters can forgive Mel Gibson, whose fall was far more public (and whose entry, Hacksaw Ridge, is pleasantly old-fashioned but not nearly as remarkable), who knows? Is Moonlight too—welp—“intersectional”? (Few films pair an artist’s eyes with a social worker’s mentality as fluidly as it does, even if the sociology crowds out the dramaturgy from time to time.) Would a nod in that direction be taken to mean that Hollywood is standing up to social-progress whiplash or confirming that it’s “out of touch” with “regular Americans” (mediaspeak for folks like the Chandlers)?
All right, guys. I’m pumped. The nominees for Best Picture crushed it this year, despite the color-blindness of the Academy—which isn’t the kind of color-blindness that the late, great “Stephen Colbert” used to compliment himself for back in the Colbert Report days. (Here’s a thought: There are so many good choices, why not widen the field to 2009 levels, as a means of increasing its diversity?) I’ll start where I left off, and dive right in.
The lukewarm reception of Joy will hopefully shake David O. Russell and Jennifer Lawrence out of the complacency that this bric-a-brac movie is surely the product of, but I want to take a moment to give them points for their sheer, batshit audacity. It’s a pleasure to think about and a pain to write about because it’s so chocked full of nuts that it’s hard to figure out which layers are intended as bullshit and which layers aren’t intended as bullshit but really, truly are. Wading in this septic think tank can put one in touch with the sublime; it’s like listening to an interview with William Shatner. But it can also be exhausting. Joy feels suspiciously like the last few Russell-Lawrence collaborations, but they power through this one as if under a 108-degree fever. They’ve sweat off the emotional weight.
First, the good stuff: This is a movie about a mop. That’s about the best thing I can say about it. I’ve never seen a film, or engaged with any work of art intended for adults, that has put a human face on household products. The mop is a symbol of our modern-day Cinderella’s domestic oppression as well as her ticket to freedom. More importantly, Joy in Joy makes the case that the mop mod she’s invented will shave minutes off your chores. Those minutes add up, and add value to your life. What Joy represents is utopianism on a granular scale: so granular that her ilk is often unfairly overlooked. Viewed through this prism, as-seen-on-TV junk is transfigured. Who knew that one might find an unsung hero behind ped eggs and lint removers and containers of OxiClean? Look deep into the food processor or up a set of knives and one might find the traces of a human being who was trying to make the world a better place. Joy sells her mop on QVC, back when shopping from home was a novel thing, and the film makes it clear that the network stands for something other than late-capitalist malaise. For a tweaker like Joy, it’s an honest-to-goodness platform for ideas.
Russell can make these points, and Lawrence can sell them through her dimples, all while going headlong into butterscotch-and-brown late-’80s kitsch. Their contrarian impulse has swagger, and it’s essentially humane. This is a female-empowerment movie without malice, but also, perhaps, without mental toughness. When one of QVC’s most experienced on-air personalities tries to shill for it, Joy’s mop is a flop, so the inventor decides to get in front of the camera herself. Bradley Cooper, as the slick head of programming, tries to weigh her down with bangle bracelets and gallons of hairspray, but she insists on going before the lights in plainclothes, so the viewers see the aw-shucks in her eyes. Guess what? It works!
So far as I can tell, the best vindication for Christopher Nolan’s method in Interstellar is its black hole. Like so much of this director’s work, black holes are spectacularly dense but ultimately empty, and yet the fallen star of this film casts a warm afterglow. That most lethal of all world-killers—an appetite incarnate that eats global warming for breakfast and Creation for doomsday brunch—is presented not as the jaws of nonexistence but rather a swirl of molten glass. It isn’t an impediment or the object of dread; it’s closer to being a miracle. Like so much that comes out of Hollywood, this image seemed too beautiful to be true. But, by feeding 800 terabytes worth of astrophysical research into special-effects software, the filmmakers have created the most scientifically accurate model of a black hole ever visualized. The artist’s instinct is to find truth in beauty; Nolan has found beauty in data.
Interstellar wants to ascend to the heavens, but it’s pulled down by the blue ribbons that Nolan has tied to every last meteoroid. Maybe ten minutes have passed before Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is told by his father (John Lithgow) that this world was never enough for him. Those lousy bureaucrats who don’t believe in dreams have reduced this erstwhile engineer, test pilot, and all-around gentleman and scholar to subsistence farming. In the midst of something-or-other that somehow relates to climate change, our intrepid hero’s old employer, NASA, has been defunded. Instead of trying to stanch this cataclysmic dustbowl, the powers-at-be are sticking every able body with a pitchfork, and rewriting textbooks to remind kids that the moon landings were faked. Strangely enough, for what appears to be a rapidly collapsing, quasi-totalitarian state, the military has also been abolished. The plow is mightier than the sword—until it comes time to take out the riot gear.
You see, it’s not like back in the day, when people used to have ideas and build things—or so Grampy Lithgow groans, again and again. But who could blame these neo-Okies for not wanting to listen? An estimable actor like Lithgow must need Ex-Lax to get lines like these out. Whatever his heartfelt convictions, Nolan is not a born populist when it comes to expressing them. He mistakes pablum for wisdom. And then he goes and does a flip on his perceived audience anyway by having Coop discover that NASA’s alive and well, and guzzling tax dollars in secret—ergo, whoever is running things is actively stripping its citizens of hope for the future, by way of propaganda, but is at the same time financing a rescue operation behind their backs because they’re too cynical to be counted on to support it? Perhaps I’m slicing things too thin, but considering his reputation as an idea man, Nolan sure seems oblivious when it comes to implications. This homage to 2001 could’ve been called Mr. Magoo Meets the Monolith. Continue reading “Interstellar”→
Inside Llewyn Davis has a surprisingly unironic title. It begins with its title character (Oscar Isaac) performing at the Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village in the winter of 1961. “Performing,” in this case, is a loaded word; he’s on intimate terms with his guitar, and the sad lyrics, which he knows by heart, flow from him like a dirge—as dry as sand in an hourglass. When he finishes, Llewyn feebly chatters with his audience, chuckling into his woolly chin: “If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it’s a folk song.” Though it’s a canned joke, this is a Coen brothers movie; it resonates like Bert’s cryptic preface to Mary Poppins: “I fear what’s to happen all happened before.”
Llewyn Davis has the richness that has been so painfully lacking in much of the Coens’ recent output. Even True Grit, with its fairy-tale effulgence, had the flatness of cold-in-the-ground history. If anything, the Village bohos here seem too much like people today—but that could proffer a greater authenticity than we are now accustomed to, especially as it pertains to the age-of-innocence early ’60s. (My suspension of disbelief was only challenged by the use of the word “fucked” as an abbreviation of “fucked up”; that variation only came about recently.) Some of the richness comes from the casting of Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake; their humanity—her sensitivity and his showmanship—can be dampened but not reduced to shtick. Unlike so many of the pawn-of-fate cartoons that waltz in and out of Coen brothers movies for an existential yuk, actors like Jeanine Serralles, Jerry Grayson, and F. Murray Abraham all give the impression of having a past. A caricature like the wizened hophead that Llewyn road-trips to Chicago with is more plausible in this light; it lets John Goodman be a real eccentric: an amusing exception rather than an excessive norm. It’s the difference between an ensemble cast and a lot of actors.
Under the pale sunlight provided by the cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, however, all the world looks to be a stage; the spotlight is so bleak that even Goodman’s purple jacket is desaturated. Llewyn had some success when he was part of a duo—and he’s still appreciated by connoisseurs—but he’s an inveterate bridge-burner and couch-surfer when the film starts, lugging his guitar with him, and a cat who scurried out of a patron’s apartment once he’d locked the door. The Coens are stringent enforcers of Murphy’s Law, and Llewyn doesn’t get off easy; but the folk singer, who refuses to sell out and adhere to the new vogue in peppiness, makes bad decisions per a coherent inner logic. With the trilogy of No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading, and A Serious Man, the Coens had forged a new genre: the feel-bad movie. If their counterpoint is bound by a set of conventions that bring about an artificially happy result, these were determinist downers; they were cleverer than feel-good movies, but, with their arbitrariness, not particularly more substantial. No Country had its cold-sweat sensuousness, but A Serious Man was a distillate of the brothers’ crippling fatalism; even its autobiographical setting implied that it was the root of it, and it went deeper still—into Judaism—without bringing anything back up. It was to art what blue-balling is to orgasm; all roads led to the dead end of fate. As a hero, Llewyn is far more like the Dude in The Big Lebowski than the pischer in A Serious Man: all three are losers, but the Dude carried the loss of ’60s activism with him—and in him. He was a happy patsy, not just a pawn, in a story made of human frostwork rather than fate’s caprice.
A copy of the collected works of the mystic Gurdjieff. A chronic, foreboding cough. An indirect answer when P.L. Travers is asked if she’s a mother. These are the ways that Saving Mr. Banks, a Disney movie about the studio’s quarrel with Travers to adapt her Mary Poppins novels, gently implies there’s a world beyond its family-picture confines. These are the ways it undermines Walt Disney himself while still venerating him and his worldview. If the film’s interpretation of the bohemian writer as a Mrs. Grundy spinster is less than honest, it gives Travers the advantage of being in the body of Emma Thompson, who throws her verbal darts, by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith, right on target—at the patriarchy that Disney (Tom Hanks) and his associates at one point represented. In a way, the movie has the teasing fun of a sexless seduction: Travers, with a contract stipulating final-cut approval of the Mary Poppins screenplay, has Disney by the family-friendly balls; and the mogul, who’s spent two decades trying to coax the rights out of her, is in the unusual position of having to appease. (He wants to make the film for his daughters, who love the books. His children, like the rest of the characters’ private lives, go unseen.)
I enjoyed Saving Mr. Banks, directed by John Lee Hancock, quite a bit. The “present-day” scenes have a lulling effect, and much of the old Disney sentimentality—say, Paul Giamatti’s wheelchair-bound daughter—is ladled on in such a way that makes it rather reassuring; Pixar, with its delicate irony, hasn’t completely wiped it clean. It’s easy to imagine that Disneyland in 1961 has the same nostalgic charm for some people as London of 1910 had in Mary Poppins. Again, I think Thompson is essential; she bridges the simplistic contrast between An Education London and A Single Man L.A., and though Travers represents one extreme, she highlights the absurdities of the other. If there’s something reassuring about her chauffeur’s spoonful-of-sugar optimism, it finds its counterpoint when Travers discovers the welcoming committee of Disney stuffed animals in her hotel room, and crams it into her closet. (The sentimentality levels begin to spike when she rescues Mickey and snuggles with him.) There are fine moments of Disney’s team (Jason Schwartzman, B.J. Novak, Melanie Paxson, and Bradley Whitford) being cowed by Travers in the writers’ room, and even some convincing moments of inspiration at the piano. Much less effective—in fact, tendentious and monotonous—are the flashbacks to the author’s upbringing in Australia. Her father, well played by Colin Farrell, is like one of the dads played by Robin Williams 20 years ago, except he pays for his whimsicality with drinking and an early death. Unfortunately, this is the crux of the movie’s schema.
You see, it’s wise old Uncle Walt who pinpoints the source of Travers’s obstinance, and sells her on forking over the film rights to her work. (We’re often reminded that she does need the money.) Disney wants to make a Mary Poppins that somehow vindicates her father; and, indeed, rewatching the classic for the first time as an adult, I saw that Mr. Banks (a surprisingly affecting David Tomlinson)—who sacrifices his career to spend time with his children—is its emotional center. His change of heart is the wind that blows the nanny away. I guess there’s some symmetry in making a banker see the light in recompense for a free spirit who flopped as a banker; but are we to believe that Travers was sold on Disney’s notion that fairy tales need earthbound morals, and decided to inspire the fathers of the world to do a better job? I don’t see a tribute to her father in this. What I do see is a tribute to Disney’s ideology. He was an industrialist in entertainment; his Manifest Destiny was selling the American Way, for which he was an esteemed ambassador, a self-made innovator from Missouri who made sugarcoated art for the masses. Almost 50 years after his death, the name rarely signifies the man; for skeptics, it’s become a byword for a paternalistic wholesomeness, the aesthetic equivalent of authoritarianism. (Tom Scocca quoted Bambi to define his subject in his treatise on smarm.) Disney branded himself before it was de rigeur; he was an exponent of the old guard that collapsed before culture went all American Hustle, and there hasn’t been an equivalent of him since. (Steve Jobs, with his cult of personality, came close; but his history with his biological children is proof against his being seen as a paternal ideal. The adult-daycare offices of Google or Facebook, however, might come close in the public imagination to what Disney represented in 1961.) Though Hanks doesn’t look like him, he isperfectly cast; he radiates the innocent magic that the icon still inspires. Walt Disney’s legacy lives on in Saving Mr. Banks—even if the movie hints at the fallout that occurred after Mary Poppins was premiered. It imposes his commercially reductive worldview on Travers’s life; her legacy will be viewed from his eyes forevermore.
Movie Monster 